CW: Some slight gore and description of abuse victims
It took a few hours for us to collect all the evidence we could of the child trafficking ring so it was dark by the time we were able to coordinate with Alice again.
Alice efforts to to break Dr. Bumby’s will had worked so thoroughly that he spilled his guts about all the dirty little secrets the moment I hit him with even the smallest compulsion to talk. It was almost impressive as he happily spilled how he was getting the kids, what he did to brainwash them, and where he sent them. It filled in quite a few little gaps we hadn’t managed to puzzle out so far from his notes. He had even confirmed again that he had raped Alice’s sister and then tried to cover his tracks by killing the entire family by burning their house down.
Then just when we didn’t think it could get any worse, we found out that he had taken the key from Alice’s sisters room and was using it as some sort of perverse trophy, using it publicly as the end to his pocketwatch’s chain.
At this point, there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t think he deserved all of the pain Alice had caused, carving him up like that, let alone wanted to offer him mercy. Before finishing him off, Alice ripped the key off of his pocket watch to hang around her neck. Then she stabbed forward, making him spill his guts again… literally this time. This was made all the more surreal as I realized the blood didn’t seem to stick to her blue dress.
Alice looked a slight bit happier to have had her revenge, but the knowledge of what had been done to the rest of the kids seemed to crash down on her again as she looked around the night skyline of London.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I actually swiped the beer bottle with his soul in it. There wasn’t going to be a better example of someone who deserved to have their soul destroyed, so I would keep him around for my first new emergency jump soul.
Alice seemed to have rallied a bit as she reached down and carved the word ‘rapist’ into his chest.
It was a bit macabre, but I couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it when she hung him up so he would be visible in the window in the morning.
As we left the orphanage for the last time, putting all the kids to sleep on our way out, I considered talking to her about her plans. Maybe where she wanted us to drop her off at, but seeing the return of her turbulent emotions I decided to leave it for now.
For her part, Alice took a moment to head to her room and get a portrait of her family hanging on the wall, a few pairs of clothes, and a small stuffed animal. I opened a portal into a empty crew cabin for her to store her stuff in the shuttle, but after placing them inside Alice just narrowed her eyes at me, saying nothing, before turning and following the rest of the group making it clear she planned on staying with us for now.
Thus the following hours since discovering we were in the world from the video game ‘Alice: Madness Returns’ quickly became a blur. I would have liked to say that we happily, or maybe viciously enjoyed saving the kids caught in this trafficking ring, but it wasn’t true. The children from Dr. Angus Bumby’s ‘Houndsditch Home for Wayward Youth’ were rarely emotional when being rescued. Instead they simply remained eerily blank and resigned. Some of them didn’t even seem to notice we were there.
Perhaps somehow worse yet, it wasn’t even hard. Anyone could have done it if they had known or cared about what was going on. No one besides Alice seemed to have powers in this world and while we weren’t truly superhuman yet, no one here was an actual threat. Most of the people didn’t even have firearms.
That had gotten me thinking about our strength as I watched Amy smack a guard aside. If I had to guess I would have put us only a little above peak human. Still below Captain America and miles away from a demigod like Superman, but way above anything but a dedicated professional athlete. And that was without making us look like bodybuilders. Amy had even started working on Hermione, rightly assuming that she seemed interested in joining us.
So, in the end, my girls and I were able to manhandle… or I guess ‘womanhandle’ the guards and thugs we ran across as we searched out the children that Dinah indicated that we needed to find before dawn.
The only real challenge was simply the sheer number of places I needed to portal to before the city woke up. And, as I had already said, despite my bed efforts it quickly became overwhelming.
In fact, it was overwhelming enough that my girls were forced to organize the operations themselves. And, as if to give me some sort of silver lining, I was able to watch as the girls excelled at doing so. They almost naturally formed into four groups with no extra planning from me.
Helping me directly, I had Dinah who, with a little help from Luna, was moving down Thea’s list of suspects and narrowing down the locations and resistance we would expect at each location. Thea then scanned that information and organized it into lists we could follow.
Luna, while occasionally helping Dinah, met with her father and found a newspaper press and with a few memory charms they had the building to themselves. From what I could tell, a bit of temporary enchanting saw the printing press ready to put out our special edition. The two then worked on spelling out all the information the people would need to take the trafficking ring down for good. I suspected Luna was doing something with her abilities based on how often she sat staring into the distance.
In the meantime, the rest of the girls formed two strike teams with very little input from me as they planned out their targets. When I had noticed and saw their planning I had formalized the groups by designating them our heavy hitters and stealth specialists respectively.
The heavy hitters included Ahri, Ahsoka, Sarah, Alice, and Hermione. This let Ahri distract and hide them with Hermione providing utility and defense while the rest focused on swift and ruthless offense. This team was led by Ahsoka who somewhat reluctantly took charge, yet by the time they finished their second raid the rest of the girls seemed happy with her leadership.
The stealth specialists included Taylor, Aisha, Sabah, and Amy. Taylor, with her semi-omniscient view of everything through her bugs led the group and would scout and coordinate, Aisha couldn’t be found, Sabah was a silent locksmith and general support, and Amy could put people to sleep either directly, through one of my portals, or ensure Taylor had enough bioengineered knock-out bugs ready.
At one point Thea even took a photograph of a particularly horrifying basement with cages that the kids were being kept in. That was going on the front page of the newspaper. I couldn’t remember when photos could be printed like this but magic would make it possible regardless. Plus it didn’t really mater as we weren’t staying to be caught up in the aftermath anyway.
So thus went the night as we assaulted nearly three dozen houses. In the end, my girls only felt the need to kill the adults in four manors. Those ones were the ones where they found not only abused and assaulted kids, but found children that had been physically tortured to the point where the kids were bloody on top of that. Two still had dead children in their basements.
After seeing that, not even Hermione or Luna protested as the rest of the girls left the five men and two women in those houses hanging from their front yard trees, their toes just barely able to reach the ground to make their deaths last longer. They even added signs around their necks saying they tortured children.
The rest of the locations saw the children healed slightly but unfortunately left there as evidence for the police or mob to find. Instead the adults were put into a deep sleep that would last until the next evening… or until someone woke them up. Honestly I didn’t really care who found them as even if there were a few more lynchings before the arrests could be made, I wasn’t about to loose any sleep on child traffickers.
With the paper done and distributed to where the newspaper boys would be expecting to receive them, based on the information we found in the newspaper offices, we were down to just one final item of business. We needed to alert the London Police.
As the girls that were the most serious and arguably most intimidating, Taylor, Ahsoka, Alice, Ahri, and Hermione took the little trip to visit the Commissioner, Sir Richard Mayne. He was the head of London Constable force and thus the man at the top that could most easily get the ball rolling on the arrests. Normally I would have worried about him being part of the conspricity regardless of if his name was listed in Dr. Bumby’s notes, but Dinah had confirmed he was both clean and would be horrified by what was going on.
I momentarily considered standing next to the five of them, but after considering how they did almost all of the work in taking these monsters down I decided to let them handle it.
Actually, As I located Sir Mayne’s home and moved the portal inside, I realized that this was something we all needed by now.
This was something unequivocally necessary, something good, something we could do to really help the innocent people we visited with.
I mean, after visiting so many worlds where the problems were still too big to handle, this was a nice change of pace. Hopefully soon we could have the power to help bigger problems… the slaves on Tatooine in particular still bugged me, but for now this was a nice first step.
So, after opening a portal in the Commissioner’s home, just a bit down the hall from his bedroom, instead of standing next to them I only stepped through the portal and prepared to watch from around the corner, outside the bedroom.
My girls only paused momentarily as they saw what I was doing before they walked past me. They took a moment to prepare themselves before I saw Hermione shoot an ‘enervate’ spell at him. It was almost funny enough for me to break my cover and chuckle as I saw the man jerk up suddenly awake and incredibly confused. Enough that I set up a quick notice-me-not ward around me to ensure I didn’t distract them.
Still having trouble regaining his wits, he was rattled enough that he rubbed his eyes a half dozen times before he decided that yes, he was apparently being threatened in his own bed in his own home by five roughly 20-year-old females.
On the other hand, considering we had noticed the servants and guards around his manor I could understand how bizarre the idea we had gotten to his bed undiscovered was for him.
“What the bloody hell? Why are there bloody wagtails in my bedroom?” he nearly growled out in a gruff voice and I nearly facepalmed at how dismissive he was towards my girls. I mean even if the rest of the girls didn’t seem to have weapons, Alice was still clearly holding her vorpal knife, a massive meat cleaver with a permanent blood stain on the blade. It made me wonder if he was so dismissive of the girls as a threat because they were female or just couldn’t believe it was happening..
Yet, Ahsoka just ignored the insult. That was probably a wise move since, while I suspected that she realized she had been called a prostitute, getting distracted by that wouldn’t help the mission.
When Ahsoka spoke, her voice was professional but cold. “You might want to listen to them. They are about to give you information that will either make or break your career.”
The discussion of his job finally seemed to get the man fully awake. Good thing too as Taylor Alice, and Hermione were clearly losing their patience. Hell, Hermione was twirling her wand behind her back making me think she was considering what kind of curse she could get away with here.
Still it was Taylor that ended the stand off by throwing down the newspaper on the bed in front of him before following up, voice like ice, face completely void of emotion. “As you can see, our organization found a child sex trafficking ring right here in London. This paper is going to be handed out on every street corner in an hour.”
Conversely, Hermione’s anger which had been growing for a while, finally pushed her over the edge and she blew up next. “So get off your bloody backside and start saving those kids or I will shove your merlin-be-damned badge so far up your arse that you will be able to taste it.”
I was a bit surprised at that. She was older, but this was still the book and authority respecting Hermione. Then again, as a first year, she was also the girl who set a professor on fire to save her friend.
Ahri followed up quickly, probably both because of how angry she was and also to cover Hermione’s slip into wizard cursing. “Either you hurry to try to head this off and start raiding these homes,” while throwing another stack of papers at the man with the names of all the traffickers, “or you will be known as the man who did nothing when children were being sold right under his nose. That and you had best find and prosecute your men that were looking the other way, their names are at the top of the list”
Seeing the man pale, he quickly realized that such a belief was not only career suicide, it might be a form of literal suicide once a lynch mob formed outside his door.
Alice was visibly furious, but she didn’t say anything. I wondered if she was considering just attacking him before she pulled her knife back and drove it a solid three inches into his four poster bed, nearly cutting the massive wooden post in half. When she finally spoke up, the anger in her voice was deep and dark. “You had best move most quickly… sir.”
There was a moment where no one moved before she pulled the knife back out and simply exited the room with the others following after a moment later.
As we left the house and I started closing the portal I heard him yelling for his butler. Something about getting the coach ready while we heard his wife waking up in the room next door.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I nodded at everyone now standing in our shuttle before I broke the silence with a wry smile. “Good work everyone, I think we really kicked some villain ass this time.”
It was an attempt at humor as we had all been worn down a bit by what we had seen. This was some of the worst humanity had to offer in a city and time that was reported to be Civilized.
My girls seemed to take my attempt at breaking the ice in the manner I intended as there were a few chuckles and relieved sighs.
Opening up a portal above the main street where we could see Big Ben in the distance. It was a great vista and we watched as the sun rose on the second full day in this Victorian era London. It was only about thirty minutes later that saw teams of constables riding out furiously to track down the manors we had listed as containing trafficked kids.
That let us relax a bit as for several hours we just sat and watched the police do their job. There were a few places where a mob who had read the newspaper with the names of the criminals and had got into the manor before the constables did. Thus, a few more pieces of garbage died and none of us cared.
A part of me wondered if this was a good thing for Luna, Dinah, and Hermione to be involved so heavily as they had tried so hard not to kill anyone on Yamatai, but I wasn’t about to patronize them either. I mean, preaching second chances was a good idea, we had even given a few to those on Yamatai… but these monsters definitely didn’t deserve it.
Instead we ended up simply eating breakfast while Amy occasionally poked her hand out through one of my portals to heal a kid once the authorities had seen them, made note of their injuries, and taken the adults into custody.
With a fire lit under the Commissioner to find all the culprits listed. It was only roughly three hours or so later that the action started wrapping up and I closed the rooftop portals we had been watching from.
Turning I smiled at everyone and suggested “Good work everyone, I do believe we have all earned a quick nap after our all-nighter”. It had been a long night after all.
It was a bit hard to fall asleep after all we had seen, but a entire night running around saving kids meant I fell asleep soon enough.
In fact, it was only after sleeping until nearly noon that, one by one, we all slowly got back up and we started planning for our next jump.
Looking around I decided to ask if anyone had any suggestions. “I think we have another few hours until I am back to one hundred percent. Is there anything else we need to do before we leave? Luna, Dinah, anything changed with the kids we rescued?”
We all glanced at Dinah and Luna who considered for a moment before they shook their heads.
To my surprise it was Amy that spoke up. “I have been thinking, could we get a few more seeds or maybe even a few mushrooms? I kinda want to ramp up a bit. Transforming the biomass from the simple carbohydrates from the ration packs to proteins takes a lot longer… I mean, even just swapping flavors or textures can get a bit tedious.” She looked uncomfortable as she momentarily looked down before meeting my eyes and I wondered if expressing her annoyance with busy work like the endless hours at the hospital was bringing up bad memories. Yet she continued looking up, “With even more mouths to feed, like on Tatooine, it can take…” She considered for a moment, “like an hour or so to make each meal for all of us.”
Internally I winced as I didn’t realize that she had been spending at least three hours just converting food each day there. Yet I had known it was something we needed to keep an eye on. I mean, it was why we had our eternal quest to find more supplies.
It hadn’t always worked, sometimes we just hadn’t had time but I knew I wanted to do better. However, outwardly I only paused for a moment before I simply shrugged and smiled. “Of course, I don’t see why we can’t get a bigger variety, especially if it makes it easier on you.”
That request saw me moving a portal to a farm outside of London where we paid a farmer several British pounds for a massive pile of different types of seeds and even a few saplings he helped us to dig up. The money we had gotten from Dr. Bumby before Alice killed him, or more accurately… finally let him die, was more than enough so it hadn’t even cost us anything.
Amy looked happy so we all quietly returned to the shuttle. Yet, not having anything else to do for the remaining four or so hours, I turned back to Riley to see if there had been any changes to her soul.
Unfortunately after a few minutes of gently, for lack of a better term… poking her soul, I had to admit that I didn’t see much improvement. Ahsoka seemed to have seen what I was doing because when I pulled back, Ahsoka leaned forward and put her hands on Riley’s head before closing her eyes and focusing.
Nothing happened immediately, but I knew Jedi mind healing could be a very slow process.
Looking over I noticed Sabah stirring a potion cauldron in the corner of the kitchen, apparently making more purifying hot springs water. I was glad about her foresight as that was what I wanted to try next.
Yet before I could ask Sabah how long before the new batch of water was ready, I was interrupted by an unexpected question from behind me. “Who is that and what are you doing?”
The voice practically oozed suspicion so I wasn’t surprised to see it belonged to Alice. I hadn’t quite forgotten she was still on the shuttle, but I hadn’t been paying attention to what she had been doing with everything else that had been going on. Thus it really shouldn't have been a surprise that she had found us while we had been attempting to help Riley in one of the empty crew cabins. I mean, we hadn’t even closed the door.
Sighing, knowing this was going to be a bit of a long discussion I turned to face the mistrustful young woman. “This is Riley. Long story short, she got some powers when she was young. A monster mentally hurt and controlled her for years to turn her into his little pet… thus she became another monster that enjoyed hurting and killing innocents. We tried to help her, but I fear that by removing his hold on her, we hurt her more in the little time we had before we were forced to leave. We weren’t very good at helping people like this at the time. When we finally returned she had apparently not received the help she needed and we basically brought her back from the very edge of death.”
That got Alice to at least stop subtly flexing her hand like she was considering summoning her knife. “I see. Might I enquire what happened to this… man?”
I smiled grimly “We broke him before we turned him over to the authorities because his ability was useful to help save that world.”
I watched as Alice considered this before she raised an eyebrow. “I do not believe I misheard you, but I must because I do not understand your emphasis on the distinction ‘that world’.”
I smiled and stood up. Sitting in a low chair and bending over Riley’s body was uncomfortable regardless of how good Amy had made our bodies. “You didn’t mishear me. But this really is a discussion that is better served where we can both sit down and talk.”
Alice paused for a moment before she gave a sharp nod.
I followed her out to sit around the central table and Ahsoka, probably having finished all she could do for now, followed us out.
I considered for a moment how to approach this. On the outside, she seemed like a good choice of young woman to make the offer to even if she was on the younger side at 17. Yes, she was a little more concerned with revenge than actually being kind, but she was smart and she was powerful even if I didn’t fully understand how her powers worked.
Yet on the inside she was a young woman who was obviously deeply traumatized by what she had gone through. That trauma wouldn’t really help with building friendships within the Family and romancing her was almost certainly out of the question… not for a very, very long time, probably after some actual therapy from a real therapist.
I paused… actually maybe I should find a therapist to just straight up join us. I mean, even if we eventually solved all our issues, it wasn’t like we wouldn’t find more people out there that needed one.
So deciding to play it straight, albeit without all of the details, I started to explain. “Short story. I am a man who can hop between realities. Between worlds. Books, Plays, Stories. There is a reality out there somewhere where it is actually happening, there are even beings that aren’t actually human.”
I could tell that Alice didn’t fully understand or believe me, but she seemed willing to humor me for now so I gestured to Ahri to let the illusions on Ahsoka and herself drop and demonstrate that the two of them weren’t actually human.
To her credit Alice tensed but didn’t otherwise react to the reveal. I was momentarily confused by this until I realized that her wonderland had things a lot stranger looking than a fox girl and an orange skinned humanoid with some head tails, so I continued my explanation. “You could say that we have just two goals. We help people when we can.” I said while gesturing towards her and Alice clearly realized she was one of the people we had chosen to help. “There are even a dozen or so more people we have sleeping in the cargo hold which we saved from their world and are looking for a new one they can settle in.”
I hesitated a moment longer before I continued. It was better to spell it out rather than make her think I was trying to hide things. Hiding things from powerful women that lived with me was just as stupid an idea as it had been the first week after I woke up on Earth Bet.
“And I am looking for powerful, kind, and smart women to travel with me. Some of those women choose to be intimate with me, but that is their choice.”
My blunt statement seemed to throw Alice for a loop, yet it was only a few moments later before she collected herself enough to continue. “So these women are your mistresses then?”
I blinked before I shrugged. “If they want to be and they are old enough. Currently I am only intimate with Ahri, Amy, Sabah, and Taylor.” I explained while pointing each of them out. I was happy to see each of the girls smile and nod when Alice looked at them questioningly.
Luna nearly skipped over to sit in my lap even if her face was very serious. “And there are some of us that want to join, but Max has asked us to wait because he has been worrying about controlling us or grooming us while we were too young to understand… which is silly as he is only 4 years older than me and Dinah.”
Alice frowned and looked at Luna but to my surprise Luna’s face got even harder.
There was a moment where I was worried they would actually start some sort of confrontation before Luna smiled and gestured for Dinah to come over and sit next to her on my lap. The two of them were now leaning back towards me before Luna decided to speak up again. “You are worried about us, which is good as long as you understand we are going to choose what we want to do for ourselves. In fact I think Max here would like to have someone watching him to make sure he treats us right.”
Alice opened her mouth to say something before Luna’s words seemed to register and make her hesitate and she snapped her mouth closed for a moment. When she decided to try again she actually looked a little thoughtful. “Then… then I would appreciate the chance to travel for you to see what type of man you carry yourself to be rather than the words you and your… girls weave about yourselves.”
Thinking about it I nodded.
Alice smiled before she looked back at Riley’s cabin. “I would like to offer my assistance in caring for… Riley.” She seemed to consider her words for a few moments before she looked me in the eye. “I think that I am actually able to enter the… the mental landscapes… of others… when in there I might be able to cut away that which has been tormenting her.”
Surprised, I looked at Alice for a few moments. That wasn’t in the game… I paused, no… well, maybe it was. As she moved around the real world, her wonderland changed. That very well could have been the influences of the people’s mental landscapes rather than just her opinions on those places.
Considering for a few more moments, I glanced at Riley’s room before I nodded. “We don’t have a good way of helping someone with that much trauma. If you can do something, I think that could really help her. Thank you~”
Alice actually stood up and, while she didn’t look happy or friendly, I was pleased to see her give me a firm nod before she walked towards Riley’s room. Once inside Alice took a moment to get comfortable before she reached out and held Riley’s hand and closed her eyes before she went very still.
Seeing as there was nothing to watch there and now with nothing else to do for a while, I turned and wandered towards the cargo hold.
It was then that I nearly ran over another girl that I suddenly realized was relaxing in the other kitchen chair. She had her feet up on the counter and had headphones on and seemed, for all the world, to be just jamming out by herself.
Seeing me actually paying attention to her she tilted her head back and winked. “What the hell do you want?”
I blinked as it took me a moment to process that level of sass before I sighed. “Aisha… where have you been?”
I saw the curve of her lips and I rolled my eyes before she had even responded. “Max, if you wanted to join me in bed, you just had to ask.”
Rolling my eyes again out of pure principle now that I knew she had just been napping I turned back to head towards the cargo hold.
When I arrived in the cargo hold I found Amy, Hermione, and Xeno transfiguring some of our trash into pots for Amy’s experiments. As it was just compacting and forming the stuff we already had, it should last years and I nodded in approval.
Looking around for another moment I considered only briefly before I spoke up. “Will we have enough room on the ship?”
Luna seemed to have been waiting for this as she skipped past me and with an excited voice and asked. “Oh, are we finally going to expand our rooms now?”
I blinked, then blinked again before I slapped my forehead. “Damn it, we could have expanded the Shuttle a week ago before we even got to Tatooine and we wouldn’t have all been jammed together for so long.”
Luna snickered, but everyone else looked thrilled at the thought. The shuttle really could get a bit cramped with so many people.
A quick check of the time let me know that we had about an hour or two before my estimated time to jump so I sighed before heading back to get my engraving kit and text books. If we wanted to make sure this expansion was stable, then I was going to do it right and tie it into a few stabilizing runes.
Luckily for us, Xeno had done this several times before so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel here. As we had discussed before, the rule of 10 being the largest completely save scale factor was still true, but with a cargo hold of nearly 12m by 7m by 4m, (taking up a good quarter of the ship’s interior)... Well, we would have a football field’s worth of space in just a few hours.
True, a football field wasn’t enough to grow crops for a dozen or so people the natural way, but it would certainly be enough to give Amy some space to work and I suspected we could find some magic to help speed things along as well.
One of the hard rules of Harry Potter magic was that you couldn’t create food from air as it would usually disappear before you could get nutrients from it and transfiguring other items into food didn’t help either. Apparently the small bits of matter were held in the transfigured form by the person’s own magic until they could exit the body the natural way… it just didn’t give you any nutrients along that path. If the transformation ended early… well, things could end quite… badly.
So while just summoning food magically was out, I was pretty sure that growth acceleration spells, watering spells, and sunlight spells existed. In fact, glancing over at Xeno, it seemed he was already planning those out and I was sure Hermione could search through our text books for other options as well.
I smiled as they took the idea and ran with it. I barely had to do anything besides help carve the runes. This was also a big moment for us as, if it worked, our eternal quest to get more supplies would be reduced to occasionally getting only moderately trivial things like new clothes, paper and pens, new books, etc.
Thus, the last thirty minutes saw my girls all standing around and levetating piles of dirt through the portals I had to our shuttle from an unoccupied piece of land a little further up the Thames river.
When we were done, the cargo hold wasn’t full, but the back third had a solid two feet of soil. However, at that point we were all pretty tired of moving dirt around and I decided to call it good enough for now.
Not for the first time I wished I could have simply pushed my portal’s edges through solid matter. That way I could have simply scooped the dirt directly into the cargo hold without any effort at all.
Then again, it would make my portal a useful weapon and it really did seem like my abilities lacked that metaphorical edge. My soul abilities were slow, my portals were “soft”, my omnilingual abilities weren’t useful in battle, and my adaptability didn’t even allow me to shapeshift.
Although maybe I was doing it wrong, it was possible I could figure something out if I talked to Tonks and got permission to inspect her soul once we got back.
Shaking my head I braced myself and reached out and looked at our options. Besides me I noticed Luna, Dinah, and Xeno being put to sleep on the sofa. Everyone else was laying around waiting to see where we would go next.
I turned to Alice, “This is your last chance to leave. We are making our way back to Hermione’s home world to help her friends and we won’t be back here any time soon. Also, you should be aware that the jump is often uncomfortable. If you want, I can ask Amy to put you to sleep so you don’t need to experience it.”
Alice seemed to hesitate for a moment longer but shook her head. “I am quite assured of my decision. And I am quite confident in my fortitude.”
Nodding I turned and focused inward looking at the options.
The first option I felt for was very dark and I immediately shied away from it.
The next one felt like it was… insane and I quickly moved on.
I grimaced as the next seemed… orange? I sighed…this might take a while.
In the end, it was another dozen or so I went through before I found one that felt oddly similar to Alice’s London.
A little amused, I smiled and actually spoke out loud. “Huh, another London maybe… I wonder which one this one will be.”
Pulling us up and out of this reality, I was once again hit with a wave of exhaustion. The trip was also still slow as the minutes ticked by as we traveled between realities.
Yet, just like before, as we arrived I felt a sense of accomplishment.
Getting up from my chair at the table I got a glass of water before I opened up a tiny little peephole and looked outside.
To my horror I was greeted with a hand written warning scribbled across the wall.
‘Bad Wolf’
“Well… shit…”
Interlude Sabah:
Sabah was happy with Amy.
She was.
She hadn’t been as interested in finding more women as Amy had been. She had always assumed she would end up with a woman and be happy, just the two of them.
Yet she couldn’t help but notice that Hermione had been giving her a bit of a side-eye.
She wasn’t sure if Hermione was actually trying to flirt a bit or just curious about what Amy and Sabah’s relationship within the Family was like.
She did seem like someone who would experiment to find out for herself.
Amy had even noticed and seemed fully supportive of the possible flirting that had been going on.
Sabah had to admit that she really wasn’t looking to another girl to flirt with, but she really did enjoy curling up with a good book on the sofa while Hermione read one of her textbooks…
Sabah let herself smile slightly.
Even if she wasn’t flirting, it was kinda nice to have a quiet, book-loving friend to spend time with.
Interlude Sarah:
Sarah was done, she was tired of being ignored.
Max had barely talked to her in days.
The rest of the girls barely acknowledged her efforts.
She had the self-awareness to know a large amount of her discontent was because she wanted to be the center of attention, but that knowledge didn’t actually fix her issue with being ignored.
Bakuda was getting out of here the moment they found a decent world.